1 1) Whence comes the Son? • From the Father’s substance? o Gnosticism asserted that souls, emanating from God, are divine and part of the divine substance. The divine substance is divisible and its emanating, necessary. Ø The Gnostic Valentinius used the term homoousios to describe the derivative nature of this emanation (Cf. Williams, Arius, 135). o In battling Gnosticism, Origen objected to the assertion that the divine substance is divisible and therefore is, in some sense, material. Ø Origen seems to have understood homoousios “to designate co-ordinate members of a single class, beings sharing the same properties” and so the gnostic derivative sense of homoousios and “expressions like ‘out of the Father’s substance’ equally reflect the materialist implications of gnostic teaching in Origen’s eyes” (Williams, Arius, 135; Cf. Ayers, Nicaea, 24). Origen does not employ substance language when he writes about divine existence. o Athanasius employed substantialist language in order to emphasize that the Son was not a product of God’s creative will like all other creatures, but that he shared the Father’s very substance or being. (Kelly, Creeds, 235; Cf. Zizioulas, Communion, 121). Ø His substantialist language made its way into the Nicene Creed of 325: “only begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father.” (This will be later modified by Constantinople in 381—see below) Ø “When he therefore attached “the generation of the Son to God’s substance and not to his will, Athanasius provoked the accusation of the Arians that he was implying that the generation of the Son was not free but necessary” (Zizioulas, Communion, 108, ft.18). Ø “Athanasius rejected this accusation but “without any demonstration of why logically the Arian argument was wrong. Athanasius insisted that the Father generated the Son ‘willingly’ and ‘freely’ but having made in his theology a clear-cut distinction between the creation of the world from God’s will and the generation of the Son not from God’s will but from God’s substance, he had to say more in explanation…” (Zizioulas, Communion, 120-1). o Hilary of Poitiers (c. 300-367) “This unbegotten One, therefore, brought forth the Son from himself (ex se Filium genuit) before all time, not from any pre-existing matter…nor from nothing, because the Son is from Him. … What is in the Father is in the Son also because the Son is from Him; the Son is in the Father because he is not a Son from anywhere else…” (On the Trinity, quoted in Ayres, Nicaea, 181). Ø Does Hilary say that the Son is from the substance of the Father? (H. S.) o “In an anti-Marcellan context (see below), Eusebians and Homoians argued that the Son had substantial existence and was not purely an ενεργια. The Son imaged the Father’s ousia and ενεργια as a distinct subsistent. (Homoians, of course, would insist that the Son was subordinate to the Father) (Meredith, Cappadocians, 197). o Lewis Ayres argues that Augustine “presents the generation of the Son, in rather traditional Nicene manner, as the generation of one from the Father’s substance or essence, a generation in which the Father shares all that he is with the Son, the one who is God from God” (Ayres, Rethinking, 12). • From the Father’s will? o “On a number of occasions Origen deploys the idea that the Son is generated ‘as the will from the mind’. This language serves not only to present the generation as non-material, but also to emphasize the Son’s generation as an intimate 2 expression of the Father’s existence” (Ayers, Nicaea, 27; cf. Williams, Arius, 140- 1). o Arius argued that the being, substance, essence of the unique God was absolutely incommunicable. … Moreover, if another being were to share the divine nature in any valid sense, there would be a plurality of divine Beings, whereas God was by definition unique. … The Word was ‘the first-born of all creation’ (Col. 1:15), meaning that, like all other creatures, He had been created by divine fiat out of nothing” (Kelly, Creeds, 232-3). Ø In his confession with Euzoius, asking for amnesty, Arius was willing to write, “We believe…in the Lord Jesus Christ, his only Son, who was begotten from him” (εκ του πατρος), but in the sense that everything can be said to be ‘from’ or ‘out of’ the Father’ (Williams, Arius, 278, 352). o For Eusebius of Nicomedia (a supporter of Arius): “(There is) one, the unoriginated, and one produced by him truly and not from his substance, not participating at all in the unoriginated nature nor in his substance, but produced as altogether different in his nature and in his power…. There is, indeed, nothing of his ousia, yet everything that exists has been called into being by his will…” (Quoted in Ayers, Nicaea, 53). Ø For many, the theme of the Word’s generation from the will of God “served both to secure the generation of the Word against materialist division of God, and to emphasize the unique character of the Father as true God” (Ayres, Nicaea, 53). o In the first half of the 4th c. several writers turn “to the language of the will or ενεργια when the seek to explain the Son’s generation without seeming to attribute passion and division to God. Thus Marcellus of Ancyra uses the language of ενεργια to explain how it is that the Son can come forth and work without God being extended materially. Ø For Eunomius, the Father’s ενεργια or will is passionless and unique, and may be temporary: the Son is the product of this temporary activity. This helps to preserve the Father from division or passion (Ayres, Nicaea, 198; cf. 53). Ø Later pro-Nicenes will use ενεργια language but will insist that there is one divine ενεργια just as there is one divine nature. See the developing doctrine of the inseparable divine activity (DIO) implying one divine nature (Ayres, Nicaea, 198). • From the Father’s substance, no, from the Father as person. o As we have noted, substantialist language had made its way into the Nicene Creed of 325: “only begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father.” o The Council of Constantinople (381) struck most of that phrase (leaving ‘begotten of the Father’) for “the debate that took place between the years 325 and 381 made it evident that the concept of ‘substance’ could make the begetting of the Son a matter of necessity. The accusations made by the Arians and Eunomians indicated that the begetting of the Son was involuntary and unfree, so the Church made this alteration to the Creed in order to rule out all sense of compulsion” (Zizioulas, Lect. 61). o “Gregory of Nanzianzen contributed the solution by making a distinction between the ‘will’ and the ‘willing one’: the ‘will’ is common to all three persons of the Trinity. … The ‘willing one’ is a person, and as such is primarily none else but the Father. … Although, therefore, the Son, as Athanasius insisted, is not born out of the will of God, as is the case with creation, he nevertheless is not generated 3 unwillingly, and this because he is born ‘of the Father’ who, as a person and not substance, is the ‘willing one’ (Zizioulas, Communion, 121). • “Of the same substance as the Father” (ομοουσιος). o According to Kelly, “the original Nicene teaching was, not that the Father and Son are numerically one in substance, but that They share the same divine nature” (Kelly, Doctrine, 254; cf. 267). o This phrase marks a full rejection of the Arian position by asserting the full deity of the Son. “The Son, it implied, shared the very being or essence of the Father. He was therefore fully divine; whatever belonged to or characterized the godhead belonged to and characterized Him” (Kelly, Creeds, 238; cf. Meredith, Cappadocians, 104). 2) The “strange, novel” term homoousios (cf. Kelly, Creeds, 242ff; Kelly Doctrine, 234ff; Williams, Arius, 69, 130ff; Ayres, Nicaea, 92ff; Meredith, Cappadocians, 102ff). • “(I)t can scarcely be disputed that (the Nicene Creed) contained much more than a denial, point by point, of the principle Arian contentions. Not satisfied with merely demolishing the heretics’ positions, it affirmed the full divinity of the Son in language which implied, if it did not explicitly assert, the doctrine of identity of substance between Him and the Father” (Kelly, Creeds, 242-3). • “The chief vehicle of this (affirmation) was the term homoousios…which was a strange, novel term, in the company of which no great body of churchmen felt entirely at home” (Kelly, Creeds, 243). o For Origen, “hupostasis and ousia were more of less synonymous and meant ‘real individual subsistence, as opposed to existence as a mental construct only: in the background was the familiar philosophical distinction between what exists kath’ hupostasis and what exists kat’ epinoian, ‘conceptually’” (Willaims, Arius, 132) Ø Origen “deplores those heretics who confuse the ‘concepts’ (ennoiai) of Father and Son and make them out to be one in hupostasis, as if the distinction between Father and Son were only a matter of epinoia and of names, a purely mental distinction which we make in reflecting on the single hupokeimenon of God” (Williams, Arius, 132). Ø “That the Catholic Christian faith involves belief in three hupostaseis is stated firmly in the Commentary on John 11:10: and this concludes an argument that the Holy Spirit has its own ‘proper ousia’, being distinct from the Son as the Soon is from the Father” (Wiliams, Arius, 132). Ø “In the light of all this, it is almost certainly right to conclude that Origen could not have spoken of the Son as homoousios with the Father” (Williams, Arius, 132, 135).